Where'd Tiger Go?

LA JOLLA, CA: A WEEK OR SO AGO, TIGER WOODS WAS HERE at the Torrey Pines Golf Course with a huge entourage as he extended his PGA winning streak to 7 in a row at the Buick Invitational. It’s quieter now. Unless you were up in the 6 am darkness this morning. That’s when about 40 of the 300+ participants at the fourth annual RunningUSA Meeting got together for a stunning trail run through Torrey Pines State Park and down to the Pacific itself.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

The rest of the day, we listed to presentations from a variety of speakers on a number of different topics. All the presentations related to promoting the sport of road running and the many great events across the country that make up the sport. Several highlights:

>>Two marketing specialists, Gregg Bagni and John Winsor, spoke about road racing’s enviable position as a well-organized, mass participation sport. “You already have what every other marketer in the world is looking for,” said Winsor. “You’ve these great events that make a deep and direct connection with tens of thousands of participants.”

>>Alan Jones, the inventor of the bicycle-wheel rotation counter used to certify virtually every road race in the country, noted that he had recently been forced to recertify a local course, due to construction on the course. When done, he checked his efforts against a Google Map site on the Web, and found the Google results exactly the same as his bicycle measurement.

>>Dave McGillivray revealed that the BAA didn’t want to use the ChampionChip system in 1996, because it was unproven. “We didn’t want to be the guinea pig,” he said. However, when registration for the one-hundredth Boston Marathon reached 40,000—double the expected number—he told the BAA board that they had no choice. “We figured if the ChampionChip people screwed up, we’d just blame them, but they came through perfectly.” The system worked, and has been going strong ever since.

>>At the same time, Dave Camire, from CoolRunning.com flatly predicted that radio frequency RFID chips are coming. These will supposedly be cheaper, and capable of being inserted on race numbers. Mary Wittenberg of the ING NYC Marathon wanted to know how quickly this technology might reach road races, noting that big races need more and better feedback in real time to improve their TV telecasts. None of the experts gave her a clear answer. Alan Jones observed: “I’ve been hearing these reports since 1999, so all I know is that the technology obviously isn’t simple.”

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

>>In an afternoon session about road race timing, Jones, a former IBM programmer, told about the time in 1970 that he used an acoustic coupler in a phone booth to upload results to a $1 million IBM mainframe. “My phone connection got interrupted once, but fortunately I had a backup,” said Jones. “I had another dime to make the connection call again.”

>>The RFID chip approach came up again in this afternoon session, leading several ChampionChip spokespeople to comment that they just didn’t think the technology was accurate or cost-effective yet. Still, they acknowledged several RFID companies in the audience, and these companies were distributing their materials to all interested parties.

>>“People always want us to speculate about the future of chip timing,” noted Mike Burns, president of ChampionChip USA. “I think we’re only four or five years away from biometric chips in bibs or in race singlets themselves. The chips will be able to analyze your sweat, and say, ‘It’s time to drink some Gatorade.’ ”

>>Lunchtime speaker Ann Audain, 5 time New Zealand Olympian and founder of the St. Luke’s Women’s Fitness Celebration in Boise, ID, told several funny stories. When she accepted prize money in the famous 1981 Portland Cascade Run Off, “I received a telegram from the New Zealand athletic federation almost immediately,” she said. “It informed me that I was banned for life. Imagine that in 1981 you could get banned for life for taking money, but now you only get banned for two years for using performance-enhancing drugs.”

Later she added: “This sport doesn’t embrace it’s history enough. We have so much to be proud of. We should do more to show our pride.”

A Part of Hearst Digital Media
Runner's World participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.